Confidential Prey (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (3 page)

“No blood or anything like that?”

“Right,” Dey-Keya said. “A case was never opened on the woman.”

“So there was no missing-person investigation or homicide investigation or anything along those lines?”

“Correct. If we find her body, obviously that will change.”

“What about surveillance cameras in the parking lot?”

“They don’t keep the tapes that long.”

Teffinger
looked out the window.

They were paralleling a surreal mountain range. Unlike the Rockies, these mountains had no trees or greenery. They were barren, wind-chiseled, desolate deathtraps with no redeeming value other than an as a reminder of how inhospitable the earth could be. Rattlesnakes and scorpions might be able to live there but not much else.

Teffinger put his hand on the pilot’s shoulder and said, “Don’t crash.”

She patted his hand.

“Haven’t in over a day now,” she said.

Teffinger knew she was kidding but looked at Dey-Keya just to be sure.

The man nodded.

“You crashed two days ago?”

“No, not two days ago, yesterday.”

“You’re messing with me,” Teffinger said.

“Wish I was,” she said. “They say that when you fall off the horse you need to get right back on it. What you see up here is me getting on a horse.”

“How’d it happen?”

“It just dropped,” she said. “It was some kind of mechanical failure.” She pointed to the right. “There it is.”

He looked.

Sure enough, there on the brown desert dirt was a tangled mess of charred metal with some virgin splashes of lime-green.

Dey-Keya slapped him on the back.

“You should see your face,” he said.

Ten minutes later
Raverly said, “That looks like a road.” It wasn’t much, hardly more than an occasional indentation on an otherwise clean desert pallet, but it was enough that they followed it west.

It dead-ended where the mountains started to rise.

“This has to be it,” Teffinger said.

They circled in search of an arroyo or body or anything that looked like it didn’t belong.

Ten minutes passed.

Nothing showed up.

“Set it down,” Teffinger said.

“Are you serious?”

Ground level
was the same temperature as the business end of a Cuban cigar. Heat radiated through Teffinger’s soles and baked the bottoms of his feet.

He had no hat or sunglasses.

The horizon line wiggled behind a plume of rising heat.

Whatever search was to be had here wouldn’t be a long one.

They split up.

Raverly headed up the road.

“Where you going?”

“If he was going to play cat and mouse with her, I don’t think he would have come out this far where the terrain gets so uneven. I think he would have hung back where everything is flatter and there was less chance of getting his car stuck.”

It made sense to a point.

“Maybe, but she would have run this way, trying to get to higher ground.”

The heat pounded them with mean fiery fists.

The search turned up nothing.

Then Raverly shouted,
“Got something!”

Teffinger pushed through the heat in that direction and found her standing to a slight indentation in the ground, possibly a shallow arroyo at one point but now mostly filled with dirt.

Out of that dirt stuck a hand.

It was mostly bones, long picked clean at this point, but definitely a human hand, connected no doubt to a human body beneath the surface.

Teffinger looked at Dey-Keya and said, “Are your crime lab guys any good?”

“They’re the best.”

“G
et them out here.”

Day Thirteen

August 15

Monday Night

The meticulous
crime scene investigation dragged on
hour after hour after hour. In the end they had a woman’s body silently scooped from the dirt in a state of almost total decay. The bones from her ribcage to her skull were severely shattered, consistent with being hit by a car at high impact. Although her face was unrecognizable, the pendant around her neck wasn’t.

It belonged to Brooklyn Parks.

Other than the woman’s body, they found nothing. The scene didn’t cough up a scintilla of evidence as to who killed the woman. There were no cigarette butts, no empty coke cans, no dislodged car parts, not a single thing of use, not from the place where the body was found all the way back to the nearest
piece of asphalt
.

They had a victim and not an ounce more.

At the end of it all, it was too late to catch a flight back to Denver. Teffinger and Raverly checked into separate rooms at the Cosmopolitan. Teffinger drank his weight in water, showered and laid down on the bed just to rest his eyes for a few minutes.

When he woke up it was evening.

The sun was almost gone and the city’s neon was in full force.

The room had a small balcony overlooking the strip.

He stepped onto it and let a light breeze blow on his face.

Then his phone rang.
It was Sydney Heatherwood, the newbie to the homicide department, one year into her adventure.
Teffinger pulled up an image of a
young mocha face and tight athletic body.

“I’m out here in San Francisco working with a detective by the name of Andy Peterson,” she said. “He’s had the crime unit and cadaver dogs working the bluffs at Baker Beach all day. We’re finally hitting pay dirt, right now, even as we speak.”

“You got a body?”

“We do indeed,” she said. “It’s buried three feet down, just like your good friend Mr. K said. It belongs to a woman but other than that I can’t tell you too much about it right now.”

“Good job.”

“I just watched. They did all the work.”

“You sound weird.”

“It’s winter out here,” she said. “There’s fog and rain and wind. I don’t know who invented this place but they sure screwed it up.”

Teffinger smiled.

“Fi
gure out how the guy picked the
lawyer to be his victim. Why her out of everyone in the world? Figure out if she was a wrong place wrong time girl or something more deliberate and calculated. Figure out the motive.”

“I’ll try.”

“Thanks, I owe
you one.”

“One? What kind of math are you using?”

He dialed
Raverly’s room and said, “I’m going to go scrounge up a beer somewhere. You want to come along?”

She did.

She did indeed.

They headed north on Las Vegas Boulevard, watched the Bellagio fountains dance to a Celine Deon song, then crossed over to Paris and played the pass line at a craps table long enough to get four complimentary drinks, Bud Lights for him and scr
ewdrivers for Raverly. He was $10
0 up at that point, tossed the chips on the waitress’s tray as she passed and told Raverly, “Forty-eight hours.”

He expected her to not understand.

She knew what he meant, however.

He was referring to the time left before Mr. K struck Denver.

“How are you going to stop him?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

Outside
the strip was chocked with headlights five lanes thick in both directions, moving slower than the walkers. Horns honked, motorcycles revved, drunken party voic
es shouted and faces hung out
windows.

“You need to get North to tell you who his attorney friend is out in L.A.,” Teffinger said. “Then we need to get him to tell us who his client is.”

Raverly chewed on it.

Her expression wasn’t enthusiastic.

“You’re a
sking for two separate attorney
s to breach their trust,” she said. “I’ll try but we better be working on a plan B in the meantime.” A beat then, “It might be easier to follow the telephone trail. If we could get North’s records, that would show who he’s talking to in L.A. Then if we could get that person’s records, it would show who he’s talking to.”

Teffinger kicked a coke can.

“Our guy’s too smart to not have thought of that,” he said. “He’s probably using a payphone and if he is using a cell, I’m sure he’s distanced himself from it. It’s probably a disposable or prepaid, purchased for cash, or something of that nature. There are a hundred ways to do it. Go to Google and type in
anonymous cell phone
and you’ll find half of them right there.”

“Still, it’s worth trying.”

“It is and I’ll set it in motion. Maybe he wants to be caught and he’ll get sloppy on purpose. That’s not what my gut tell
s
me but you never know. The only thing I know for sure is that this guy is 100 percent legit and has coughed up two bodies to prove it.”

Suddenly something happened that Teffinger didn’t expect. Raverly grabbed his hand and held it as they walked.

“We need to get him talking some more,” she said.

“I was thinking the same thing
, except
shouting instead of talking.”

“What do you mean?”

“Talking implies control and deliberation,” he said. “I need to get into his emotions and twist them. I need him to spit things out before he gets a chance to think them through.”

Raverly squeezed his hand.

“The system’s not built for that,” she said. “There’s too much back and forth.”

“Exactly,” Teffinger said. “That’s why we need to change the system.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I need to start talking to him directly.”

“How are you going to do that? Just shut him off unless he calls you direct?”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t know
that
he’ll go for it,” she said. “There’s another option, though. We
already know he’s taken a shin
ing to me. He probably wouldn’t mind talking to me as long as he felt there wasn’t too much risk.”

Teffinger put his arm around her waist.

“
No.
You’re already too close to the fire.”

“Screw the fire,” she said.

They let themselves
get soaked by the buzz of the strip. Teffinger kept his arm around the woman’s waist, occasional
ly
moving his fingers a bit.

Her muscles were taut.

“There’s something you should know about me,” he said.

“That sounds serious.”

“It sort of is,” he said. “Someone’s out to kill me.”

Raverly came to a stop and looked at him.

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Two weeks ago I picked up this girl hitchhiking. She was broke and from out of town and just got dumped by her boyfriend. It was storming out and she was soaked and cold. I tried to get her a hotel but she had this thing about not taking charity. Finally I convinced her to at least sleep on my couch for the night.”

“I remember that storm. I watched it for over an hour.”

“Then you know how bad it was,” Teffinger said. “My whole neighborhood was in blackout when I got hom
e
. Nice guy that I am, I talked her into taking my bed and letting me sleep on the couch. She didn’t want to put me out but finally relented. When I woke up the next morning, she was dead in the bed. She’d been stabbed in the side of the head
with
a knife that was meant for me. Whoever did it thought they were killing me.”

“Damn.”

“Right, damn,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about it. The poor girl, I don’t even know who she was. She told me her first name—Atasha—but I never even asked her last name. She didn’t have any identification her purse, no driver’s license or anything. All she had was makeup, a couple of candy bars and $27.32 in cash.”

“Did she say where she was from?”

“New York, on her way to Seattle,” he said. “I’ve spent hours trying to trace her with no luck.”

“What a nightmare.”

“Actually, it is; and I don’t want it spreading in your direction,” he said.

“Well, maybe I do,” she said. “Do you have any idea who wants you dead?”

“Nothing concrete,” he said. “The best guess is that it relates to an old case; maybe a brother or relative of someone I ended up catching, something like that. We’re pulling files but nothing’s jumping up and shouting yet.”